Light your inbox on fire. What are you doing. I googled “summarized news for women” and The Skimm is the first thing that came up. The tagline is “making it easier for you to be smarter” which is basically the equivalent of using a pink pen for her. Why can’t women actually read the fucking news?

And furthermore, I know that you saw The Skimm come into your inbox this morning and you looked at it like “Oh, the news” and maybe you clicked on it but more likely you just archived it like you have for the past five months because it clogs up your inbox and reminds you of how little effort you’ve actually put into caring about the dumpster fire that is America.

You have to start caring about this dumpster fire. This dumpster is yours. You know in some recipes where it says “add one tablespoon of cold water” ??? no one is telling you that you need to hold the firehose. Just do the political equivalent of adding one tablespoon of cold water to this hot mess.

I mean, I don’t have anything against The Skimm personally aside from it dumbing down the news with the explicit purpose of making it easier for the “modern woman” to read. I get it. You’re busy and it makes it easy to stay informed when you have a million other things going on.

But delete it anyways, and read the actual news.

You’re going to need this. Here. It’s a kit to help. A box of tissues. Ibuprofen to help with the swelling. A dash button that when pressed will signal to amazon that you would please like to buy a copy of Ivanka Trumps “Women Who Work” book. You click it several times. You need kindling. Our Republican overlords are making you feel the deep bone chill, that same chill you haven’t felt since you saw 1984 in theatres for the first time with your grandfather. He’d seen the war. If he were alive now, he wouldn’t read The Skimm.

Subscribe to an actual paper, or two, or three. Pick a mantra. Something like “mainstream media” or “fake news” or “alternative facts” – a mantra that reminds you that politicians have pretty successfully and fairly quickly convinced a large population of people that being raped is a preexisting condition.

Your blood pressure is spiking. You start to think “oh god, I miss The Skimm.” Fill a glass with water. Tell yourself it’s empathy. This is also called a placebo. Drink it fast before you can talk yourself out of it. A lot of people voted for these miserable sacks of shit. A lot of people. And what’s more likely? That they’re all miserable sacks of shit too? Or that something is amiss. Something is so very amiss. Something has gone wrong. And they yearned so deeply for something that they believed that this fucking guy could give it to them. That’s a special, deep kind of yearning. The “I sold my soul because it was literally the only thing I had left to bargain with” kind of yearning. And in this case, empathy is important. Because they royally fucked over a lot of people. They thought that it was the right thing to do.

Give yourself a break. Not the “I’m going to subscribe to an easy-reader news-newsletter because the news really stresses me out” break. But while you’re pouring over this hot mess, I dunno, get yourself a latte. Or a nap or something. It’s a lot of work being a modern woman.